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The fall of the Berlin Wall and USSR were probably the most significant events of my lifetime other than 9/11. The Soviets were the enemy in pretty much the entire pop culture and education of my youth, and then when I was 12 (in a process that was likely more gradual than I remember it), they weren't. That was a pretty positive event.

I sort of feel that way, except I was 34 when the wall fell. The US-Soviet standoff and all its spin-offs seemed the largest salient fact about the World and how it operated -- and then just like that, POOF, it was gone.

The Moon Landing did not seem all that big a deal to me, just because it was such a long and careful project getting there. By Apollo 10 it was inevitable.

For specific events the moon landing was huge, as was the greatly reduced threat of nuclear annihilation once the wall fell. The assassination of King after the assassination of Kennedy was a horrible time; with all the death in Vietnam it felt like a true, low ebb. With the election of Nixon it was as if the country, if not the world had entered some new, insane phase of hatred and bloodlust. Obama's election, not because he's been the sort of president I would have liked, but because for so long it seemed impossible. I guess there's nothing George Bush and John McCain can't accomplish when they put their little minds to a thing.

Another "event" that you can't put on this list because it is not possible to define it in a single moment is the creation/expansion/application of the Internet. It's been around for, what, 20 years, and it has dramatically changed the world already. It is fundamentally changing the economy (making it truly global in far faster, efficient fashion than it otherwise ever could have been), and it is causing generations of spin-off industries and products unimaginable even 10 years ago.

Related to this is the advent of mobile communications in an extremely sophisticated, yet affordable, way. If I had told you ten or 15 years ago that you would have a phone in your pocket that would eliminate the need for:

- a phone book
- a calendar/planner
- a calculator
- an atlas
- a desktop friggin' computer
- a landline in your home or office
- much of your "snail mail"
- a video game console
- a radio or CD player
- an alarm clock
- a physical edition of a newspaper
- books
- a TV
And I'm not even talking about stuff like social media, because we didn't even have something quite like that to replace.

Do we find these brothers in Boston in four days without everybody having a smart phone? Remember, when the guy in Boston who got carjacked by the two brothers Thursday night leave his cell phone in the stolen car, the police are still able to ping the phone to effectively put a tracking device in the vehicle.

Again, I don't know where the nexus of mobile technology and the Internet fits in this list of big events, but it is a very positive, remarkable technological advance, and worth mentioning somewhere in here.

Again, I don't know where the nexus of mobile technology and the Internet fits in this list of big events, but it is a very positive, remarkable technological advance, and worth mentioning somewhere in here.

The general changes in day to day ordinary life are arguably as big as the events listed throughout this thread. I don't know how to rank them but I'm not that old (42) and I am blown away by the changes in my day to day life. Not to diminish the incredible tragedies and incredible successes of the last 4 decades but the basic stuff...I was explaining rabbit ears to a friend's son recently and you could tell he couldn't even comprehend. "Wait, you had 5 channels total?"

Another "event" that you can't put on this list because it is not possible to define it in a single moment is the creation/expansion/application of the Internet. It's been around for, what, 20 years, and it has dramatically changed the world already.

20 years? 1993? I was using the internet 6 or 7 years before that, and it existed long before.

I see a lot of people listing big events in their lifetimes, but I am surprised that nobody(unless I missed it) said the Rodney King riots. Maybe because I wasn't that far from it at the time, but that was a huge event.

I was in New Hampshire, about as far as you can get, and that one was a huge deal there too.

But isn't the beginning of another global war at least as important? And this one is proving harder to stomp out and threatens to go on indefinitely.

That's how we felt about the Cold War. And then, after a mere 44 years, it was suddenly over.

The current War against Islamo-Fascism has only been going on for 12 years.

I'm not sure that I'd agree with the narrow definition of Islamo-Fascism that's implicit in your 12 year time frame, unless you think that Haj Amin al-Husseini or Gamal Abdel Nasser were democratic socialists. And where's the Gorbachev or the Solzhenitsyn or the Walesa who might be the counterforces to the Islamo-Fascists in our current War?

I may be moving to an extremely isolated area for a few months while I build a house. With a top notch phone can I really get internet service, and enough bandwidth to plug the phone into a desktop and have it run that and a decent monitor, all without a landine?

And that's not even getting into the ghost question. Or the flickering screens, those Satan-driven flickering screens.

And the TV's had a horizontal hold knob, at least our Magnavox did. Try explaining that to someone under 30.

was explaining rabbit ears to a friend's son recently and you could tell he couldn't even comprehend.

My favorite rabbit ears story was one NYD bowl day (a huge day in our household) and Nebraska was playing Michigan in the Fiesta Bowl on NBC (mid 80s) in the late morning/early afternoon and we had a lot of heavy snow either the night before or that morning and, the old tin foil wrapped around the TV's antenna wasn't helping, so my Dad managed to get up on the roof, I swear he had a bathrobe and slippers on and was trying to clear off the Aerial Antenna we had on the roof of our house. Such a reckless and mostly feeble effort to improve the reception, only to see Harbaugh lead a wild 2nd half comeback against our Huskers.

Reagan assassination attempt - I wasn't even 10 yet, but I remember thinking how weird it was that someone would try to shoot someone famous. Assassinations were just things that happened in the past.

Falklands War - The first televised war I remember being able to watch. Being Canadian, we were obviously gungho for the Commonwealth.

San Ysidro McDonald's massacre - As a kid, this really gripped my mind for a long time. I associated McD's with happy times, and that some random guy could randomly shoot people for no reason? I had a hard time coming to grips with that.

Challenger Disaster - Just so shocking to me, that "heroes" could die like that.

Chernobyl Disaster - I remember being extremely worried about radiation.

Fall of Berlin Wall/Soviet empire - This would probably rank as the happiest event in my life (non-sports, non-personal). It was like a giant boulder was lifted off our shoulders. No more nuclear annihilation!

Magic Johnson is HIV positive - Sorta sports related, but when one of the greatest athletes on the planet can get HIV, it's suddenly not just something that could happen to someone else. And since I was 20 at the time, that meant something.

Gulf War - being old enough to be in the army at the time (but no American), it really hit home. Plus, it was the time when CNN/24-hour news really meant something to me (as we had cable at university), and I was hypnotized by the TV for hours at a time.

Email and the web - I went to University of Waterloo, and they had a very advanced computer department. I was taking computer courses (during my BMath degree) and was using email all the time. I also got to dabble in the early days of WWW, and even had the first Toronto Maple Leafs web page. I know, because it was the only one listed in the "Internet Yellow Pages" book that came out then. Even back then, I knew this was something HUGE.

End of Apartheid - The existence of apartheid seemed so grotesque, it was amazing to see Mandela freed and then for free elections (and no horrific civil war).

Quebec referendum - Thankfully, 50.58% of Quebecers didn't want to split the country apart, but it was the biggest single election night tension I felt in my life.

Oklahoma City bombing - I didn't think any single event would make me so sick to my stomach to see/hear/read.

Columbine - This one moved ahead of the San Ysidro attack as the worst mass shooting in my mind.

9/11 - I never really thought I could go a day without thinking about it, and probably didn't for at least 6 months. I think watching the replays OVER and OVER again was a mistake on my part. I'd say this is the biggest moment of my life (non-personal).

Boxing Day Tsunami - Most horrific natural disaster I can think of in my life time.

Hurricane Katrina - for humanitarian and political reasons.

The near collapse of the economy - I'm married, I own a house, I have a retirement fund, I have investments, and I remember being TERRIFIED about the economic news I was hearing in September (from the economy blogs and podcasts). So much so, it completely distracted me from any political news at the time.

The election of Barack Obama - A black man IS president? Really? In my lifetime? Wow. (I think this was almost a bigger moment for my parents, since they were alive during the segregation era.)

was explaining rabbit ears to a friend's son recently and you could tell he couldn't even comprehend.

I'm about to turn 30 in a month, and I'm probably among the last cohort to have much experience with rabbit ears. My university dorm had cable in the common room, but if you have a personal TV (my second year I scored a sweet 12 inch built-in VHS model!) you'd just get the antenna. CBC came through fairly well, so hockey was no problem. Global worked too, CTV depended on the day.

My list of events is quite similar to Random Transaction's (if you eliminate the first chunk that I was too young for)...though I remember my dad did wake us up to watch live footage of Ceausesco's overthrow. I had a very odd relationship with the Soviet Union as a child. I was just 8 when the USSR collapsed, but I was very interested in it because A) I was a geography nerd, and B) being a younger brother I developed very early on a tendency to root for underdogs/villains/the guys no one else rooted for. My brother always got to choose which side he'd represent in any games, so I learned to love the roles I was left with. My dad also has a dry sense of humour so I think he encouraged me, or at least didn't discourage me from some odd behaviour. On May Day in grade two I marched to school with a giant Soviet flag on a pole, which was...interesting.

I'd probably add the proposed coalition/prorogued parliament of a couple years ago, and the riots in the UK from last year (or two years ago?)

For positive memories, the massive days-long power-outage in North America about 5-6 years ago was a lot of fun. I'm sure for many people losing power for that long caused all sorts of serious problems, but for me it was great fun.

TCP/IP network access expanded again in 1986 when the National Science Foundation Network (NSFNET) provided access to supercomputer sites in the United States from research and education organizations, first at 56 kbit/s and later at 1.5 Mbit/s and 45 Mbit/s. Commercial internet service providers (ISPs) began to emerge in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The ARPANET was decommissioned in 1990. The Internet was commercialized in 1995 when NSFNET was decommissioned, removing the last restrictions on the use of the Internet to carry commercial traffic. The Internet started a rapid expansion to Europe and Australia in the mid to late 1980s and to Asia in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

I think 1996 was the AOL explosion for the 'average Joe' - before that, it didn't seem like 'everybody' was on the internet...

I believe it was a bit later than 1996. At the very least, my family didn't have stable internet access until 1998 or so. Again, from the same article:

During the late 1990s, it was estimated that traffic on the public Internet grew by 100 percent per year, while the mean annual growth in the number of Internet users was thought to be between 20% and 50%.

tl;dr: Learn to internet.

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Honestly, I miss a lot of worldwide news because regardless of the partisan aspect of our own news networks, the rest of the worlds is a lot worse. It's always tough to get a quality factual story(most of the rest of the world news is on par with Fox news for accuracy/factuality from my limited experience)

It depends on where you get your information from and what your language skills are.

I've had good experiences relying on BBC radio for English language world news. I haven't listened to NPR for over half a decade.

In German, I trust the Süddeutscher Zeitung, though I'd probably read the Frankfurter Allgemeine if I actually lived in Germany. Der Spiegel is superior to any American news magazine currently on the market.

For family reasons (my wife is from Kaohsiung, Taiwan), I keep my Chinese news reading mostly to the pro-DPP Liberty Times. Since we're living in Shenyang, of course, my daily newspaper reading is the local government controlled rag (the Liaoshen Wanbao). It's not great for news on the international or even national scale, but its coverage of events in Liaoning Province is actually excellent. Those not familiar with the contemporary mainland Chinese media would be surprised at the latitude these outlets have in reporting local events.

Naturally, when I read in Korean, I read the Rodong Sinmun for all the updates on the Great Leader and Juche Thought. It also provides excellent denouncements of the imperialist Westerners.

Seriously, though, the Chosun Ilbo is excellent. However, I don't follow South Korean politics closely enough to know the partisan difference between the various media outlets. This may change as my language skills slowly improve.

As far as the FOX News comparison goes, I think you could make a very good case that the ultra-partisan television and newspaper coverage in Taiwan is just as bad. The nice thing is that you can usually piece the actual story together by combining the pro-KMT and pro-DPP accounts. Television news from mainland China (and I include the clearly biased Phoenix TV) is probably worse than FOX News, though local news stations generally provide good coverage of gossipy local stories (stuff like people falling down dead outside of hospitals).

I don't think you can say the same thing for news in Germany or Austria, unless you read Der Bild / Die Kronen Zeitung. From what I've seen, the same applies to South Korean news, though certain topics (especially anything dealing with North Korea) tend to be over-sensationalized.

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I'm about to turn 30 in a month, and I'm probably among the last cohort to have much experience with rabbit ears.

I'm 28, turning 29 in June, and I remember fiddling around with rabbit ears. Of course, it's probably because my parents never subscribed to cable television. I was also slow to make the transition from VHS to DVD, and only managed to complete converting most of my old baseball tapes to DVD in 2010.

My parents also didn't own a computer capable of running Windows 95 until 1997 or 1998 (can't remember exactly). There was a time when I was proud of my DOS 6.2 skills.